The U.S. avocado industry has evolved from an emphasis on seasonal domestic production of a mix of avocado varieties to year-round availability of domestic and imported Hass avocados. California avocado producers, who account for approximately 90% of U.S. avocado production and essentially all...

After several years of informal and formal negotiations, South Korea and the United States reached an agreement to move towards free trade in April 2007. Currently, both countries await congressional approval before the agreement can be implemented. This study explains the substance of the...

California’s nursery and floral industry is the largest in the United States with a farm value for product sales totaling $3.78 billion in 2009. When floral and nursery product sales are combined, the industry ranks second among all California agricultural products, following the dairy...

This paper considers the estimation and testing of demand systems when the number of sample goods is smaller than the number of commodity choices available to consumers. In this case, the demand system is incomplete. The large majority of papers that appeared in the literature specifies and...

The Maximum Likelihood method estimates the parameter values of a statistical model that maximize the corresponding likelihood function, given the sample information. This is the primal approach that, in this paper, is presented as a mathematical programming specification whose solution requires...

This paper contains a substantial revision of a previous paper with the same title.

This paper demonstrates the existence of a unique solution of the PMP problem when both observed output quantities and limiting input prices are taken as calibrating benchmarks. This version of PMP avoids the use of a user-determined small positive number ε originally introduced for...

REVISED 4/2/2015. SEE WP-15-001 AT http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/handle/200491

In Markov-switching regression models, we use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the true and candidate models to select the number of states and variables simultaneously. In applying Akaike information criterion (AIC), which is an estimate of KL divergence, we find that AIC retains too...